Tag: energy production

Keith Kloor is a freelance journalist whose stories have appeared in a range of publications, from Science to Smithsonian. Since 2004, he’s been an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. You can find him on Twitter here.

When it comes to climate change, the bad news pummels you the way Mike Tyson, in his prime, pummeled opponents into submission. The onslaught is so relentless that sometimes I just want to crumple into a heap and yell: Make it stop! The latest beat-down, for example, is news of the record ice shrinkage in the Arctic. That seems to have shaken up a lot of people.

But before everyone sinks into catatonic despair, I want to return to a recent piece of stunningly good news on the climate front. Perhaps you saw the headline several weeks ago: “U.S. carbon emissions drop to 20-year low.”

Alas, there was a catch. The biggest reason for the decline, as the AP reported, “is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.”

If this isn’t the definition of quandary, I don’t know what is. Gas emits much less carbon than coal (probably between 25% and 50% less), which is a net plus on the global warming ledger. And shale gas, in case you hadn’t heard, is entering a golden age; it is abundant and newly retrievable across the world, not just in the United States. It’s the bridge fuel to a clean energy future that liberal think tanks and university researchers were touting just a few years ago. Given the political stalemate on climate change, one energy expert gushed in a recent NYT op-ed: “Shale gas to the rescue.”

But a grassroots backlash to the relatively new technology (hydraulic fracturing) that unlocks shale gas has set in motion powerful forces opposed to this bridge getting built. Leading climate campaigners, citing concerns about industry practices and continued reliance on fossil fuels (even if less carbon intensive), are now a big part of the growing anti-fracking coalition. Mainstream environmentalists have also jumped on that bandwagon.

Thus the battle lines are drawn, with enviros and climate activists digging in their heels against a shale gas revolution that could pay big climate dividends. This is a story in of itself. Now a new twist promises to make it even more interesting. Earlier this week, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and New York City mayor, gave the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) a $6 million grant for its work “to minimize the environmental impacts of natural gas operations through hydraulic fracturing.” The grant follows on the heels of a Washington Post op-ed that Bloomberg co-authored with a gas industry executive. In the piece, they champion the environmental and economic benefits of natural gas, while also calling for more stringent fracking rules and better industry practices.